Blissymbolics

Also called Bliss, Bliss symbols, Blissymbols, Semantography

A symbol language with its own grammar, built from a few hundred shapes that combine, older than any communication device and still in use.

What it is

Blissymbolics is a written language made of symbols rather than letters. It was invented by Charles Bliss, an Austrian-born chemical engineer who, after surviving Dachau and Buchenwald and then living in Shanghai, became convinced that a written language independent of speech, on the model of Chinese characters, could let people of any tongue understand each other. He published it in 1949 as Semantography. Nobody took it up for that purpose.

In 1971 a team at the Ontario Crippled Children's Centre in Toronto, looking for a way for children with cerebral palsy to communicate, tried Bliss and found it worked. That made it the first symbol system in AAC, a decade before PCS existed, and it is still maintained by Blissymbolics Communication International.

What sets it apart from every picture set is that it is generative. A few hundred basic shapes combine according to rules to make new meanings, and a marker above a symbol turns it from a thing to an action to a description. A Bliss user is not choosing from a list; they are writing.

Who it can help

People with a great deal to say, no speech, and limited physical access, who need a system that lets them build words nobody put on the board. Historically that meant children with cerebral palsy and good understanding, and the generation of Bliss users who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s includes some of the most articulate adult AAC users in the world.

It suits a person who thinks in language and finds a fixed picture vocabulary confining. It is less suitable for someone whose understanding is at the level of concrete objects, because Bliss symbols are abstract and have to be learned like an alphabet, and it is not widely taught in the UK now, so a person who wants it may struggle to find anyone who can teach it. Both those things are honest limitations.

For literate people, text has largely taken the role Bliss once had, since typing and word prediction are also generative. Bliss remains the strongest option for someone who has the language but not the spelling.

How it works

The vocabulary is built from around a hundred key shapes: a heart for feeling, a house for building, a circle for mouth, a wheel, an arrow, a line at various heights for ground, sky, and so on. These combine. Water plus sky is rain. Heart plus up is happy; heart plus down is sad. A small indicator above the symbol marks it as a noun, verb, adjective or plural, and a pointer can pick out part of a compound.

Grammar follows a fixed word order, and there are symbols for tense, question, possession and the rest. A fluent Bliss user can write anything writable, and the symbols can be printed with the English word beneath for a listener who does not know Bliss.

Bliss is used on boards, in books and in software; it is available in some AAC systems, and it has been given a Unicode encoding so that it can be typed and displayed like any other script.

Getting started

If the person is a Bliss user already, the priority is continuity: make sure every new device or board carries their Bliss vocabulary, and ask the assessing service to include it, because a lifetime's fluency is not something to replace with a picture set for the convenience of the staff.

If you are wondering whether to start a person on Bliss, talk to a specialist AAC service rather than a general therapist, and be honest about who will teach it and for how long. Bliss rewards years of use and punishes a term's trial.

For anyone curious, Blissymbolics Communication International publishes the standard vocabulary and teaching resources, and a few hours with the basic shapes gives a real feel for how a symbol language can work.

Where to get help

Blissymbolics Communication International is the authority and the source of the vocabulary. In the UK, Communication Matters can connect you with therapists who know Bliss, and the specialist NHS AAC services listed under specialised AAC services assess for it where it is the right choice. Scope has the history, since Bliss in the UK grew up alongside cerebral palsy services.